The Fight Against V1@gra (and Other Spam)

TO the antispam researchers at MessageLabs, an e-mail filtering company, each new wave of a recent stock-pumping spam seemed like a personal affront.

Skip to next paragraph Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Matt Sergeant, standing, says spammers have become more creative as spam-fighting tools have evolved.

The spammers were trying to circumvent the world's junk-mail filters by embedding their messages - whether peddling something called China Digital Media for .71 a share, or a "Hot Pick!" company called GroFeed for just 10 cents - into images.

In some ways, it was a desperate move. The images made the messages much bulkier than simple text messages, so the spammers were using more bandwidth to churn out fewer spams. But they also knew that, to filters scanning for telltale spam words in the text of e-mail messages, a picture of the words "Hot Stox!!" is significantly different from the words themselves.

So the bulk e-mailers behind this campaign seemed to calculate that they had a good chance of slipping their stock pitches past spam defenses to land in the in-boxes of prospective customers.

It worked, but only briefly. Antispam developers at MessageLabs, one of several companies that essentially reroute their clients' e-mail traffic through proprietary spam-scrubbing servers before delivering it, quickly developed a "checksum," or fingerprint, for the images, and created a filter to block them.

Advances in spam-catching techniques mean that most computer users no longer face the paralyzing crush of junk messages that began threatening the very utility of e-mail communications just a few years ago.

But spammers have hardly given up, and as they improve and adapt their techniques, network managers must still face down the pill-pushers, get-rich-quick artists and others who use billions of unwanted e-mail messages to troll for income. "For the end user, spam isn't that much of a problem anymore," said Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs' senior antispam technologist. "But for the network, and for people like us, it definitely is."

Shortly after MessageLabs created a filter to catch the stock spams, the images they contained changed again.

They were now arriving with what looked to the naked eye like a gray border. Zooming in, however, the MessageLabs team discovered that the border was made up of thousands of randomly ordered dots. Indeed, every message in that particular spam campaign was generated with a new image of the border - each with its own random array of dots.

"That was kind of cool and kind of funny," said Mr. Sergeant, a soft-spoken British transplant who spends his days helping to douse spam fires from his home office outside Toronto.

During a recent meeting at the company's New York office, in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Sergeant and a colleague, Nick Johnson, an antispam developer visiting from MessageLabs' headquarters in Gloucester, England, expressed both amusement and respect over the sheer creativity of the world's most prolific spammers, who continue to dump hundreds of millions of junk messages into the e-mail stream each day.

"It was almost like they knew what we were doing," Mr. Sergeant said.

SEVERAL surveys - from AOL, the Pew Internet and American Life Project and others - have indicated that the amount of spam reaching consumer inboxes has at least stabilized.

That is true for users whose networks are protected by off-site, third-party filtering services like MessageLabs', as well as those protected by network software or in-house equipment that filters messages before they hit a company's e-mail server.

If individual users also have personal spam filters installed on their computers, their in-box spam count can be reduced to a trickle.

But spam continues to account for roughly 70 percent of all e-mail messages on the Internet, despite tough antispam laws across the globe (including the Can-Spam Act in the United States), despite vigorous lawsuits against individual junk-mail senders and despite the famous prediction, by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in 2004, that spam would be eradicated by 2006.

The continuing defiance of spammers was demonstrated last week when one of them forced Blue Security, an antispam company based in Israel, to shut down its services. The company gave customers the power to enact mob justice on spammers by overloading them with requests to be removed from mailing lists. A spammer in Russia retaliated by knocking out Blue Security's Web site and threatening virus attacks against its customers. Blue Security said it would back off rather than be responsible for a "cyberwar."

While there are some indications that the growth rate of spam has plateaued or even slowed, experts say that spikes are always looming. That is partly because spammers can hide themselves or their operations in countries where law enforcement is lax, from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and Nigeria. Because some spammers can churn out 200 million or more messages a day, and because less than 1 percent of those need to bring responses from naïve, click-happy users to turn handsome profits, there is little incentive to stop.

1234Next Page »

More Topics:
Pro Solution Pills Official Site - Complete Penis Enlargement System
The average penis size is only 6" when erect and 90% of men possess this size. Are you really happy with being average though? Just .49 per bottle

The Vimax Penis Enlargement Patch
Don't take pills, go under the knife for very painful surgery, use any pumps or other devices. Just .15 per packet

Fast Size - A Medically Backed And Proven Penis Enlargement Device
As an industry leader in the field of penis enlargement, the FastSize Penis Extender provides a rapid healthy increase in the length and girth of the penis. Now just 8

Penis Enlargement, Treatments for a Larger Penis
... only two certain methods for enlarging penis size and plenty of others that won't. ... Pills and Potions for Penis Enlargement ...